Dave Clarke - Fabric 60

Dave Clarke - Fabric 60
Part of what makes Fabric 60 such a success is the sheer breadth it covers. It's been compiled by a bonafide veteran of techno—Dave Clarke—yet doesn't feature a track older than two years. Industrial techno, Detroit and electro all rub shoulders, making the disc something much more than your average 4/4 mix. The stripped back and purist skeletal sound that has dominated charts and DJ sets throughout 2011—and often found in abundance in Clarke's club sets—is nowhere to be found here, and it's for this reason that it contains a vibrancy rarely found in amongst current day techno mixes.

Clarke establishes his motive early on, placing the industrial crunch of Tommy Four Seven's "Armed 3" alongside Kenny Larkin's loopy rework of Marc Romboy vs. Paris The Black Fu's "Dark N Lovely," both cuts bringing the mood up to a bubbling intensity before the mix takes a sharp turn with the synth-heavy electro of "Silence Complot" from Cute Heels. More noisy electro follows courtesy of Turbo Recordings affiliate Gesaffelstein, after which Clarke places together a selection of throwback sounds in the form of the Lethal Agent Remix of Exzakt's "Clarity" and Heliopause's "Destination Planet Earth," both of which seem as though they've been dug from the dusty crates of some avid Underground Resistance enthusiast—not produced sometime in the last 24 months.

When it's all said and done, Fabric 60 stands tall on the back of its diversity. The fact that Clarke has blended together Kenny Larkin, Tommy Four Seven and the proto-electro of Lethal Agent and Hekiopause into one cohesive mix is to be commended. And while Clarke's roots in electro are no secret, it's a pleasant surprise to see that his relationship with the genre sits so easily alongside more straightforward forms of techno—not just as kind of offhand novelty, but as a functional and impressively leftfield accomplice.

More on Dave Clarke

He may be known as The Baron Of Techno, a moniker given to him by renowned BBC Radio DJ / journalist John Peel, but Dave Clarke has an anarchist streak a mile wide and punk in his soul, having no truck with establishment figures or authoritarianism.
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